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As Blogs Are Censored, It’s Kittens to the Rescue

TO censor the Internet painlessly, undetectably, is the dream that keeps repressive governments up late at their mainframe computers. After all, no users are so censored online as those who never see it.

The Iranian government is carrying out an Internet crackdown in hopes of subduing the protest movement that has surged since the disputed results of the presidential election on June 12. At the same time, the Iranian government has been sending out the police to restrain protesters and foreign journalists.

Thus far, however, the Iranian government has learned the difficulty of trying to control the Internet in half-steps. Because the government’s censorship efforts are so evident — transparent, even — there is a battle raging online to keep Iran connected to the world digitally, and thus connected to the world. Sympathizers around the world are guiding Iranians to safe access to the Internet and are hosting and publicizing material that is being banned within Iran.

If only Iran’s leaders had thought through the implications of what can be called the Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship, as propounded by Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His idea is deceptively simple: most people use the Internet to enjoy their lives, and among the ways people spread joy is to share pictures of cute cats. Even the sarcastic types (who, for example, have been known to insert misspelled messages under pictures of kittens) seem to be under their thrall.

So when a government censors the Internet, it had better think twice: “Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites,” Mr. Zuckerman wrote for a recent talk. People who could not “care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos” and thereby “block a few political ones.”

As it happens, Mr. Zuckerman said, the Iranian government’s censorship task has been made harder because there is a thriving blogging community there, which he attributes to an earlier Iranian censorship campaign against traditional print media, in 2003. Writers flocked to the Internet. This fact, combined with a history of blocking access to social media tools since at least 2004, means that a large group of computer-savvy communicators “have had five years to figure out” how to get their message out.

They have learned about all manner of “proxies,” that is, improvised ways of evading censorship — often connecting to a computer outside of Iran, which then can connect to the Internet freely. In earlier cases, the important news that bloggers had to share on a social network might have related to soccer, or a certain favorite pet, but today those same tools are used to get the word out about protests and a spirit of defiance within Iran.

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What government could bring itself to block this?

From his experience as a founder of Global Voices, an aggregator of citizen media from around the world, Mr. Zuckerman says he has learned to value the roots laid down by a community of bloggers.

In Kenya, he said, bloggers were important commentators and reporters in 2007-8 on a disputed election, and people would ask why there were so many bloggers in Kenya.

It turned out, he said, that “Kenya has the second-most bloggers in Africa and that mostly they are not writing about politics; many are writing about rugby.” There was, he said, “a fascinating latent capacity — people who knew how to use the tools, knew how to write well, to tell a story with words and pictures.”

“Suddenly a bunch of people flocked to blogging tools,” he said. “We had never heard about of lot of those people. A number of people were manufacturing blogs from whole cloth for propaganda purposes. It was hard to know who they were, if they were credible. In Kenya, we knew who they were; we knew their favorite rugby team.”

There are practical benefits to the mainstreaming of political protest online. It presents another barrier to censorship.

Mr. Zuckerman said there had been discussion about having a dedicated human rights site — “and we realized that it will be the most attacked site in the world,” he said.

“The response,” he said, “is to say let’s go in the other direction — encourage anyone that has a human rights site to mirror it everywhere, including sites like Blogspot.com with lots of noncontroversial sites. It is kind of hard for Iran to block Blogger.com well, not that it is hard, but it is complicated. They would have close down a lot of blogs, including blogs with cute cats.”

Beyond the practical benefits, there is something satisfying about a country being assisted by ordinary bloggers who suddenly show their skills in organizing and belief in basic political principles. It harks back to heroes like the Roman leader Cincinnatus, a farmer who had to be persuaded to lead the republic in a time of need and after succeeding quickly returned to the farm. Any functioning society needs professional politicians, just as any modern society needs political blogs, but it is good to be reminded that leadership and political voices can come from other ranks.

But, Mr. Zuckerman reminded me, “You have to have the sword at home. You don’t want to have to buy a sword at the last minute.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: As Blogs Are Censored, It’s Kittens to the Rescue. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe